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Bush’s speech marks the end of their legacy tour. It seems like there ought to be something profound to say, but the words elude me. I guess, from their perspective, they thought they were doing the right things. Their perception is that we were behind them for a while, and then we weren’t so much. For a time, they urged us to stay the course. Then, I suppose they thought that we just didn’t have the courage to see things through to the end, and that they were left to make the tough decisions by themselves. In the end, we let them down.<\/p>\n
I doubt that either one of them will ever connect with the real questions. What kept us following them for so long? Why did we re-elect them in 2004? Why wasn’t Abu Ghraib or the Valerie Plame story enough to set off the alarms? Or the absence of Weapons of Mass Destruction? For people on our side of the fence, it was so obvious, even though we’d been good sports and followed them for a while after 9\/11. We were scared too.<\/p>\n
Some of us dropped back with all of the Axis of Evil talk. For others, it was invading Iraq, a country that hadn’t provoked us and wasn’t part of 9\/11. I think we bought that Abu Ghraib was some out of control bad apples for a while. But for most that stayed on board, it was the Conservative, anti-Liberal, or Religious Right forces that kept the support together. It took Katrina to wake us up, and then the N.S.A. domestic spying program. Even after that, things only slowly began to unravel as the wars drug on, and the torture came to light, the U.S. Attorneys got fired, and the Scooter Libby Trial filled the papers.<\/p>\n
It never occurred to either of them that we abandoned them because they were simply the worst leaders we’ve ever followed. They don’t know that we didn’t want to change our form of government in the fundamental directions they were moving. They didn’t understand that it was lost on no one that they had ridden into office on the moral high ground, yet our government was a sea of corruption and scandal. They have no clue that they chased their support away all by themselves with their secrecy and their fabricated Talking Points.<\/p>\n
So we’re left to pick up the pieces and to try to get over all the disillusionment and bitterness, and it seems like there ought to be something profound to say, but the words elude me.<\/p>\n
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Bush’s speech marks the end of their legacy tour. It seems like there ought to be something profound to say, but the words elude me. I guess, from their perspective, they thought they were doing the right things. Their perception is that we were behind them for a while, and then we weren’t so much. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2822","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2822","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2822"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2822\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}